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Saturday, September 08, 2012

This article recently appeared in BMC Psychiatry, then was shared via Creative Commons License on BioMed Central. Transgenerational trauma (the term most often used in Holocaust survivor studies) and intergenerational trauma (the term most often used in Native American research) are finally becoming more accepted in the social sciences. Therapists often see this is sexual trauma, neglect or abuse, mental illness, and addictions being passed either directly or indirectly from one generation to the next.

This paper looks specifically at Brazillian survivors and their families - and while the authors caution that the results cannot be generalized, they confirm previous studies as well as making a solid case for intergenerational resilience.

Abstract

BackgroundOver the past five decades, clinicians and researchers have debated the impact of the Holocaust on the children of its survivors. The transgenerational transmission of trauma has been explored in more than 500 articles, which have failed to reach reliable conclusions that could be generalized. The psychiatric literature shows mixed findings regarding this subject: many clinical studies reported psychopathological findings related to transgenerational transmission of trauma and some empirical research has found no evidence of this phenomenon in offspring of Holocaust survivors.

MethodThis qualitative study aims to detect how the second generation perceives transgenerational transmission of their parents' experiences in the Holocaust. In-depth individual interviews were conducted with fifteen offspring of Holocaust survivors and sought to analyze experiences, meanings and subjective processes of the participants. A Grounded Theory approach was employed, and constant comparative method was used for analysis of textual data.

ResultsThe development of conceptual categories led to the emergence of distinct patterns of communication from parents to their descendants. The qualitative methodology also allowed systematization of the different ways in which offspring can deal with parental trauma, which determine the development of specific mechanisms of traumatic experience or resilience in the second generation.ConclusionsThe conceptual categories constructed by the Grounded Theory approach were used to present a possible model of the transgenerational transmission of trauma, showing that not only traumatic experiences, but also resilience patterns can be transmitted to and developed by the second generation. As in all qualitative studies, these conclusions cannot be generalized, but the findings can be tested in other contexts.

Here is the background section of the paper, which offers some useful information on this topic. Follow the link at the top to read the whole article.

Background

More than 50 years after the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, researchers and clinicians are still devoted to studying the long-lasting consequences of the traumatic experiences endured by Holocaust survivors and their descendants. This is probably the most comprehensively researched case of transgenerational transmission of trauma [1]. Despite this, there are no published studies conducted with Brazilian offspring of Holocaust Survivors (OHS).This phenomenon has importance beyond the study of OHS. Many studies suggest that genocides in Rwanda, Nigeria, Cambodia, Armenia, and former Yugoslavia brought about distinct psychopathological symptoms in offspring of survivors [2]. Depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), attention deficits, and behavior disorders were more pronounced in children of tortured parents, as compared to controls [3].In the medical literature, the first study concerning the transgenerational effects of trauma in OHS was published in 1966. The author, Dr. Vivian Rakoff, was researcher at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, a city where thousands of Holocaust survivors had settled [4]. Then, other psychiatrists and psychologists who were also treating OHS published case reports of their own [5-7], proposing that the psychiatric disorders of these patients were the result of a “survivor syndrome” [8] perpetuated from one generation to the next [9].The idea that a parental traumatic experience could reach the second generation soon gained consistency. Clinical studies [10-13] reported a wide range of affective and emotional symptoms transmitted over generations: distrust of the world, impaired parental function, chronic sorrow, inability to communicate feelings, an ever-present fear of danger, pressure for educational achievement, separation anxiety, lack of entitlement, unclear boundaries, and over-protectiveness within a narcissist family system.

Although clinical data provided evidence of psychopathologic effects on OHS, some methodological limitations were apparent: predominance of case reports, unclear definitions of psychopathology, small sample sizes, sampling biases, absence of control groups, and lack of standardized instruments [14].

The literature on the “Second Generation” has grown quickly and profusely since the mid-1980s. Controlled studies have confirmed that Holocaust trauma has psychological impacts on the children of survivors [15], such as higher levels of childhood trauma, increased vulnerability to PTSD and other psychiatric disorders [16,17].Conversely, other studies have pointed out that OHS were in no way affected in terms of personal adjustment [18-20] and that differences between OHS and control groups could suggest a specific character organization rather than psychopathology [21,22]. Specific types of interpersonal relations were found in OHS, and were related to the pattern of parental communication regarding the Holocaust [23,24]. No evidence of personality disturbances was showed in methodologically sophisticated studies conducted with nonclinical samples of OHS [25,26].A series of meta-analytical studies conducted with second generation [27] and third generation [28] offspring found no evidence of transgenerational transmission of trauma, except in studies conducted with “selected” samples. These resilient patterns were widely described in literature and, for the purpose of this study, we adopted the definition of resilience provided by the American Psychological Association: “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or even significant sources of stress – such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors. It means 'bouncing back' from difficult experience” [29].There are three critical conditions in almost all definitions of resilience: “(i) growing up in distressing life conditions and demanding societal conditions that are considered significant threats or severe adversities, (ii) the availability of protective factors, including internal assets and external resources that may be associated with counteracting the effects of risk factors, and (iii) the achievement of positive adaptation despite experiences of significant adversity” [30].The review of the literature suggests that current studies on transgenerational transmission of trauma to OHS are not conclusive. There is no consensus between the clinical observations and empiric research on the existence of long-term psychological effects on Holocaust survivors and their offspring [31,32]. Whereas case reports are indicative of transgenerational transmission of trauma [33], systematic studies have found no psychopathologic manifestations in the children of Holocaust survivors, except when they were exposed to lifethreatening situations [34,35].The objective of qualitative studies [36-38] is to explore conceptual aspects [39] and understand different meanings and nuances of these apparent contradictions between clinical research and controlled methodologies. The present study aims to detect how Brazilian OHS perceive transgenerational transmission of their parents‟ experiences in the Holocaust. We should point out that studying specifically this sample is an important data, in as much as the vast majority of the specific literature is based on American, European or Israelite population. The immigration of the first generation to Brazil and the Brazilian culture itself could play a diverse role in the experience of being offspring of Holocaust survivors.

This is a nice overview of the work in moral social-psychology embraced by the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce). Smells a bit like Spiral Dynamics in some places - it's also heavily reliant on Jonathan Haidt's recent work, which poses problems for me due to Haidt's conservative bias (which he denies, and thus the problem).

Not long ago, I described 3 particular ‘meta concepts’ that are present or emerging in the RSA’s work. These were:

(i) Mental complexity and adult development – the notion
that there exists a ‘hidden curriculum’ of mental tasks in life that
require a certain level of mental complexity in order to navigate
effectively. Central to this concept is the importance of how we know, not just what we know, and of taking things as object that were once subject.

(ii) Cultural theory – the notion
that there are, to varying extents, four dominant cultures at play in
the world: egalitarianism, hierarchicalism, individualism and fatalism.
Proponents of this theory argue that efforts to tackle major challenges
usually need to embrace and draw upon a mixture of all of these (except
fatalism). This is particularly true of ‘wicked’ problems, which unlike
‘tame’ ones cannot be addressed through ‘elegant’ but blunt solutions
e.g. using only hierarchical sanctions to combat crime or individualist
incentives to overcome climate change.

(iii) Values modes – the notion
that most people fall into 3 predominant value groups: settlers,
prospectors and pioneers. Which type best defines you depends upon the
extent to which you are ‘inner directed’ or ‘outer directed’. The lesson
for policymakers is that policies and political messages need to be
tailored to fit each group, otherwise efforts at changing behaviour may
prove fruitless.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, the reason why I’m trying to
identify these broader concepts is because they help us to make sense of
the world, acting in a way as umbrellas for all the other minor lessons
and rules that seek to guide our day-to-day actions. To put it another
way, the likes of cultural theory, mental complexity and values modes
offer maps of life’s terrain, whereas tit bits of information and the
latest research insights only give a narrow set of directions to where
we want to go, some of which often appear to contradict the paths laid
out by others.

Since posting that blog, I had a chance to read Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Righteous Mind. This, I believe, may act as a contender for a 4th
spot in the guidebook of meta concepts. Haidt’s book is an
extraordinarily rich account of the origins of moral psychology and a
revealing exploration of how the different states of our moral minds are
able to shape group behaviour and drive divisions in political and
religious communities.

Trying to distil the book’s contents into a single line or two is an
impossible task, but his central thesis can be broadly understand as
follows: there exist in the world a variety of intrinsically-borne
‘moral matrices’ that have helped to bind people into successful groups,
but which have also left us divided on lots of different issues. When
Haidt talks about ‘moral matrices’, he is referring to the different
assortment of ‘moral foundations’ – what might be colloquially termed as
morals or values – that each individual or group has. To put it in
simpler terms, Haidt draws parallels between moral foundations and taste
receptors; just as everybody has different preferences of flavours, so
too do they have their own distinctive moral palates.

Moral Foundations Theory,
as it is formally known, identifies 6 particular moral foundations that
make up our moral matrices, some of which are more prevalent than
others. Each of these are summarised in the table below.

Drawing upon the data gathered on his research website YourMorals.org,
Haidt argues that liberals tend to have moral matrices that are built
with only 3 of the Foundations – Care, Fairness and Liberty – whereas
conservatives have moral matrices that rest upon all 6. As a result of
the sheer breadth of their moral palates, the messages and policies of
conservatives are more likely to resonate with a wider segment of the
population than are those of liberals (or liberatarians).

The Righteous Mind goes on to
explore many issues in depth, but the Moral Foundations Theory alone is
likely to have sizeable implications for the way in which we seek to
pursue political, social and economic progress. We are already seeing,
for instance, how the left are attempting to tap into people’s Fairness
foundation receptors (a sensitivity for proportionality, not just
equality). Think Labour’s recent internal debate about introducing
conditionality within the welfare state. Conversely, witness how Mitt
Romney’s speech to the GOP convention was littered with phrases that
were intended to prompt people’s Care foundation (it will be interesting
to see what comes out when Obama gives his own speech in a week or so’s
time).

I imagine the Moral Foundations Theory could
also be a useful resource beyond the world of political messaging and
grand policy-making. For example, could it tell us anything about how to
make behaviour change initiatives more effective? Or about how teaching
methods could better support children with different moral dispositions?

Slavoj Žižek has lost some of the star-status he enjoyed a year or two ago when he seemed to translated and profiled nearly weekly in U.S. journals. His rise to fame began with the 1989 translation into English of The Sublime Object of Ideology and continued to increase over the next two decades, perhaps peaking in 2009-2010 when he was reportedly hanging out with Lady Gaga.

From my perspective it seemed he was seeking controversy and probably hoped to generate discussion, but generally came to be regarded as something of a buffoon by more serious authors and critics. Maybe that is for the best - he does not feel the philosopher or social critic should pretend to have answers in the first place.

Ian Parker
claims that there is no "Žižekian" system of philosophy because Žižek,
with all his inconsistencies, is trying to make us think much harder
about what we are willing to believe and accept from a single writer
(Parker, 2004). Indeed, Žižek himself defends Jacques Lacan for
constantly updating his theories, arguing that it is not the task of the
philosopher to act as the Big Other who tells us about the world but
rather to challenge our own ideological presuppositions. The
philosopher, for Žižek, is more someone engaged in critique than someone
who tries to answer questions.[24]

However, this claim about the role of the philosopher/theorist is
complicated by how Žižek frequently derides the consumerist
fashionability of postmodern cultural criticism while affirming his
universal emancipatory stance and love for "grand explanations" (Žižek,
2008). In contrast to Parker, Adrian Johnston's book Zizek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity
argues against the position that Žižek's thought has no consistency or
underlying project. Specifically, Johnston claims in his Preface that
beneath "what could be called 'the cultural studies Žižek'" is a
singular "philosophical trajectory that runs like a continuous,
bisecting diagonal line through the entire span of his writing (i.e. the
retroactive Lacanian reconstruction of the chain
Kant-Schelling-Hegel)." Žižek's affirmation of this claim suggests that
like his predecessor Hegel,
Žižek's work is better described as rigorous in the sense of systematic
rather than as comprising a single, all-encompassing "system."

One thing Žižek has always done well is film criticism. He brings the same bastardized hybrid of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian phenomenology, and Marxist social theory to film that he generally brings to discussions of social and political issues.

In this recent article from New Statesman, he looks at the politics of Batman as revealed in the final Chris­topher Nolan installment, The Dark Knight Rises. The article contains spoilers for those who have not yet seen the film - read at your own risk.

The Dark Knight Rises shows that Hollywood blockbusters are precise indicators of the ideological predicaments of our societies. Here is the storyline. Eight years after the events of The Dark Knight, the previous installment of Chris­topher Nolan’s Batman series, law and order prevail in Gotham City. Under the extraordinary powers granted by the Dent Act, Commissioner Gordon has nearly eradicated violent and organised crime. He nonetheless feels guilty about the cover-up of the crimes of Harvey Dent and plans to confess to the conspiracy at a public event – but he decides that the city is not ready to hear the truth.No longer active as Batman, Bruce Wayne lives isolated in his manor. His company is crumbling after he invested in a clean-energy project designed to harness fusion power but then shut it down, on learning that the core could be modified to become a nuclear weapon. The beautiful Miranda Tate, a member of the Wayne Enterprises executive board, encourages Wayne to rejoin society and continue his philanthropic good works.Here enters the first villain of the film. Bane, a terrorist leader who was a member of the League of Shadows, gets hold of a copy of the commissioner’s speech. After Bane’s financial machinations bring Wayne’s company close to bankruptcy, Wayne entrusts control of his enterprise to Miranda and also has a brief love affair with her. Learning that Bane has also got hold of his fusion core, Wayne returns as Batman and confronts Bane. Crippling Batman in close combat, Bane detains him in a prison from which escape is almost impossible. While the imprisoned Wayne recovers from his injuries and retrains himself to be Batman, Bane succeeds in turning Gotham City into an isolated city state. He first lures most of Gotham’s police force underground and traps them there; then he sets off explosions that destroy most of the bridges connecting Gotham to the mainland and announces that any attempt to leave the city will result in the detonation of Wayne’s fusion core, which has been converted into a bomb.Now we reach the crucial moment of the film: Bane’s takeover is accompanied by a vast politico-ideological offensive. He publicly exposes the cover-up of Dent’s death and releases the prisoners locked up under the Dent Act. Condemning the rich and powerful, he promises to restore the power of the people, calling on citizens, “Take your city back.” Bane reveals himself, as the critic Tyler O’Neil has put it, to be “the ultimate Wall Street Occupier, calling on the 99 per cent to band together and overthrow societal elites”. What follows is the film’s idea of people power – summary show trials and executions of the rich, the streets surrendered to crime and villainy.A couple of months later, while Gotham City continues to suffer under popular terror, Wayne escapes from prison, returns as Batman and enlists his friends to help liberate the city and disable the fusion bomb before it explodes. Batman confronts and subdues Bane but Mir­anda intervenes and stabs Batman. She reveals herself to be Talia al-Ghul, daughter of Ra’s al-Ghul, the former leader of the League of Shadows (the villains in Batman Begins). After announcing her plan to complete her father’s work in destroying Gotham City, Talia escapes.In the ensuing mayhem, Commissioner Gordon cuts off the bomb’s remote detonation function, while a benevolent cat burglar named Selina Kyle kills Bane, freeing Batman to chase Talia. He tries to force her to take the bomb to the fusion chamber where it can be stabilised, but she floods the chamber. Talia dies, confident that the bomb cannot be stopped, when her truck is knocked off the road and crashes. Using a special helicopter, Batman hauls the bomb beyond the city limits, where it detonates over the ocean and pre­sumably kills him. Batman is now celebrated as a hero whose sacrifice saved Gotham City. Wayne is believed to have died in the riots. While his estate is being divided up, his butler, Alfred, sees Wayne and Selina together alive in a café in Florence. Blake, a young and honest policeman who knew about Batman’s identity, inherits the Batcave. The first clue to the ideological underpinnings of this ending is provided by Alfred, who, at Wayne’s apparent burial, reads the last lines from Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Some reviewers took this as an indication that, in O’Neil’s words, the film “rises to the noblest level of western art . . . The film appeals to the centre of America’s tradition – the ideal of noble sacrifice for the common people . . . An ultimate Christ-figure, Batman sacrifices himself to save others.”Seen from this perspective, the storyline is a short step back from Dickens to Christ at Calvary. But isn’t the idea of Batman’s sacrifice as a repetition of Christ’s death not compromised by the film’s last scene (Wayne with Selina in the café)? Is the religious counterpart of this ending not, instead, the well-known blasphemous idea that Christ survived his crucifixion and lived a long, peaceful life in India or, as some sources have it, Tibet? The only way to redeem this final scene would be to read it as a daydream or hallucination of Alfred’s.A further Dickensian feature of the film is a depoliticised complaint about the gap between rich and poor. Early in the film, Selina whispers to Wayne as they are dancing at an exclusive, upper-class gala: “A storm is coming, Mr Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches. Because when it hits, you’re all going to wonder how you thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.” Nolan, like any good liberal, is “worried” about the disparity and has said that this worry permeates the film: “The notion of economic fairness creeps into the film . . . I don’t feel there’s a left or right perspective in the film. What is there is just an honest assessment or honest exploration of the world we live in – things that worry us.”Although viewers know Wayne is mega-rich, they often forget where his wealth comes from: arms manufacturing plus stock-market speculation, which is why Bane’s games on the stock exchange can destroy his empire. Arms dealer and speculator – this is the secret beneath the Batman mask. How does the film deal with it? By resuscitating the archetypal Dickensian theme of a good capitalist who finances orphanages (Wayne) versus a bad, greedy capitalist (Stryver, as in Dickens). As Nolan’s brother, Jonathan, who co-wrote the screenplay, has said: “A Tale of Two Cities, to me, was the most . . . harrowing portrait of a relatable, recognisable civilisation that had completely fallen to pieces. You look at the Terror in Paris, in France in that period, and it’s hard to imagine that things could go that bad and wrong.” The scenes of the vengeful populist uprising in the film (a mob that thirsts for the blood of the rich who have neglected and exploited them) evoke Dickens’s description of the Reign of Terror, so that, although the film has nothing to do with politics, it follows Dickens’s novel in “honestly” portraying revolutionaries as possessed fanatics.

The good terrorist

An interesting thing about Bane is that the source of his revolutionary hardness is unconditional love. In one touching scene, he tells Wayne how, in an act of love amid terrible suffering, he saved the child Talia, not caring about the consequences and paying a terrible price for it (Bane was beaten to within an inch of his life while defending her).Another critic, R M Karthick, locates The Dark Knight Rises in a long tradition stretching from Christ to Che Guevara which extols violence as a “work of love”, as Che does in his diary:

Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality.

What we encounter here is not so much the “christification of Che” but rather a “che­isation” of Christ – the Christ whose “scandalous” words from Luke (“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he cannot be my disciple”) point in the same direction as these ones from Che: “You may have to be tough but do not lose your tenderness.” The statement that “the true revolutionary is guided by a strong feeling of love” should be read together with Guevara’s much more problematic description of revolutionaries as “killing machines”:

Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.

Guevara here is paraphrasing Christ’s declarations on the unity of love and the sword – in both cases, the underlying paradox is that what makes love angelic, what elevates it over mere sentimentality, is its cruelty, its link with violence. And it is this link that places love beyond the natural limitations of man and thus transforms it into an unconditional drive. This is why, to turn back to The Dark Knight Rises, the only authentic love portrayed in the film is Bane’s, the terrorist’s, in clear contrast to Batman’s.The figure of Ra’s, Talia’s father, also deserves a closer look. Ra’s has a mixture of Arab and oriental features and is an agent of virtuous terror, fighting to correct a corrupted western civilisation. He is played by Liam Neeson, an actor whose screen persona usually radiates dignified goodness and wisdom – he is Zeus in Clash of the Titans and also plays Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace, the first episode of the Star Wars series. Qui-Gon is a Jedi knight, the mentor of Obi-Wan Kenobi as well as the one who discovers Anakin Skywalker, believing that Anakin is the chosen one who will restore the balance of the universe, and ignores Yoda’s warnings about Anakin’s unstable nature. At the end of The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon is killed by the assassin Darth Maul.In the Batman trilogy, Ra’s is the teacher of the young Wayne. In Batman Begins, he finds him in a prison in Bhutan. Introducing himself as Henri Ducard, he offers the boy a “path”. After Wayne is freed, he climbs to the home of the League of Shadows where Ra’s is waiting. At the end of a lengthy and painful period of training, Ra’s explains that Wayne must do what is necessary to fight evil, and that the league has trained Wayne to lead it in its mission to destroy Gotham City, which the league believes has become hopelessly corrupt.Ra’s is thus not a simple embodiment of evil. He stands for the combination of virtue and terror, for egalitarian discipline fighting a corrupted empire, and thus belongs to a line that stretches in recent fiction from Paul Atreides in Frank Herbert’s Dune to Leonidas in Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300. It is crucial that Wayne was a disciple of Ra’s: Wayne was made into Batman by his mentor.At this point, two common-sense objections suggest themselves. The first is that there were monstrous mass killings and violence in real-life revolutions, from the rise of Stalin to the rule of the Khmer Rouge, so the film is clearly not just engaging in reactionary imagination. The second objection is that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement in reality was not violent – its goal was definitely not a new Reign of Terror. In so far as Bane’s revolt is supposed to extrapolate the immanent tendency of OWS, the film absurdly misrepresents its aims and strategies. The ongoing anti-capitalist protests are the opposite of Bane: he stands for the mirror image of state terror, for a murderous fundamentalism that takes over and rules by fear, not for the overcoming of state power through popular self-organisation. What both objections share, however, is the rejection of the figure of Bane.The reply to these two objections has several parts. First, one should make the scope of violence clear. The best answer to the claim that the violent mob reaction to oppression is worse than the original oppression was the one provided by Mark Twain in his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court:

There were two “Reigns of Terror” if we would remember it and consider it; the one wrought in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood . . . Our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak, whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? . . . A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror, that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror, which none of us have been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

Then, one should demystify the problem of violence, rejecting simplistic claims that 20th- century communism used too much extreme murderous violence. We should be careful not to fall into this trap again. As a fact, this is terrifyingly true. Yet such a direct focus on violence obfuscates the underlying question: what was wrong with the communist project as such? What internal weakness of that project was it that pushed communists towards unrestrained violence? It is not enough to say that communists neglected the “problem of violence”; it was a deeper, sociopolitical failure that pushed them to violence. It is thus not only Nolan’s film that is unable to imagine authentic people’s power. The “real” radical-emancipatory movements couldn’t do it, either; they remained caught in the co-ordinates of the old society, in which actual “people power” was often such a violent horror.Finally, it is all too simplistic to claim that there is no violent potential in OWS and similar movements – there is a violence at work in every authentic emancipatory process. The problem with The Dark Knight Rises is that it has wrongly translated this violence into murderous terror. Let us take a brief detour here through José Saramago’s novel Seeing, which tells the story of strange events in the unnamed capital city of an unidentified democratic country. When election day dawns with torrential rain, the voter turnout is disturbingly low. But the weather turns by mid-afternoon and the population heads en masse to the polling stations. The government’s relief is short-lived, however: the count shows that more than 70 per cent of the ballots cast in the capital have been left blank. Baffled, the government gives the people a chance to make amends a week later at another election.The results are worse. Now 83 per cent of the ballots are blank. The two major political parties – the ruling party of the right and its chief adversary, the party of the middle – are in a panic, while the marginalised party of the left produces an analysis claiming that the blank ballots are a vote for its progressive agenda. Unsure how to respond to a benign protest but certain that an anti-democratic conspiracy is afoot, the government quickly labels the movement “terrorism, pure and unadulterated” and declares a state of emergency.Citizens are seized at random and disappear into secret interrogation sites; the police and seat of government are withdrawn from the capital; all entrances to the city are sealed, as are the exits. The city continues to function almost normally throughout, the people parrying each of the government’s thrusts in unison and with a Gandhian level of non-violent resistance. This, the voters’ abstention, is a case of authentically radical “divine violence” that prompts panic reactions from those in power.Back to Nolan. The trilogy of Batman films follows an internal logic. In Batman Begins, the hero remains within the constraints of a liberal order: the system can be defended with morally acceptable methods. The Dark Knight is, in effect, a new version of two John Ford western classics, Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which show how, to civilise the Wild West, one has to “print the legend” and ignore the truth. They show, in short, how our civilisation has to be grounded in a lie – one has to break the rules in order to defend the system.In Batman Begins, the hero is simply the classic urban vigilante who punishes the criminals when the police can’t. The problem is that the police, the official law-enforcement agency, respond ambivalently to Batman’s help. They see him as a threat to their monopoly on power and therefore as evidence of their inefficiency. However, his transgression here is purely formal: it lies in acting on behalf of the law without being legitimised to do so. In his acts, he never violates the law. The Dark Knight changes these co-ordinates. Batman’s true rival is not his ostensible opponent, the Joker, but Harvey Dent, the “white knight”, the aggressive new district attorney, a kind of official vigilante whose fanatical battle against crime leads to the killing of innocent people and ultimately destroys him. It is as if Dent were the legal order’s reply to the threat posed by Batman: against Batman’s vigilantism, the system generates its own illegal excess in a vigilante much more violent than Batman.There is poetic justice, therefore, when Wayne plans to reveal his identity as Batman and Dent jumps in and names himself as Batman – he is more Batman than Batman, actualising the temptation to break the law that Wayne was able to resist. When, at the end of the film, Batman assumes responsibility for the crimes committed by Dent to save the reputation of the popular hero who embodies hope for ordinary people, his act is a gesture of symbolic exchange: first Dent takes upon himself the identity of Batman, then Wayne – the real Batman – takes Dent’s crimes upon himself.

The Dark Knight Rises pushes things even further. Is Bane not Dent taken to an extreme? Dent draws the conclusion that the system is unjust, so that, to fight injustice effectively, one has to turn directly against the system and destroy it. Dent loses his remaining inhibitions and is ready to use all manner of methods to achieve this goal. The rise of such a figure changes things entirely. For all the characters, Batman included, morality is relativised and becomes a matter of convenience, something determined by circumstances. It’s open class warfare – everything is permitted in defence of the system when we are dealing not just with mad gangsters, but with a popular uprising.Should the film be rejected by those engaged in emancipatory struggles? Things aren’t quite so simple. We should approach the film in the way one has to interpret a Chinese political poem. Absences and surprising presences count. Recall the old French story about a wife who complains that her husband’s best friend is making illicit sexual advances towards her. It takes some time until the surprised friend gets the point: in this twisted way, she is inviting him to seduce her. It is like the Freudian unconscious that knows no negation; what matters is not a negative judgement of something but that this something is mentioned at all. In The Dark Knight Rises, people power is here, staged as an event, in a significant development from the usual Batman opponents (criminal mega-capitalists, gangsters and terrorists).

Strange attraction

The prospect of the Occupy Wall Street movement taking power and establishing a people’s democracy on the island of Manhattan is so patently absurd, so utterly unrealistic, that one cannot avoid asking the following question – why does a Hollywood blockbuster dream about it? Why does it evoke this spectre? Why does it even fantasise about OWS exploding into a violent takeover? The obvious answer – that it does so to taint OWS with the accusation that it harbours a terrorist or totalitarian potential – is not enough to account for the strange attraction exerted by the prospect of “people power”. No wonder the proper functioning of this power remains blank, absent; no details are given about how the people power functions or what the mobilised people are doing. Bane tells the people they can do what they want – he is not imposing his own order on them. This is why external critique of the film (claiming that its depiction of OWS is a ridi­culous caricature) is not enough. The critique has to be immanent; it has to locate inside the film a multitude of signs that point towards the authentic event. (Recall, for instance, that Bane is not just a bloodthirsty terrorist but a person of deep love, with a spirit of sacrifice.)In short, pure ideology isn’t possible. Bane’s authenticity has to leave traces in the film’s texture. This is why The Dark Knight Rises deserves close reading. The event – the “People’s Republic of Gotham City”, a dictatorship of the proletariat in Manhattan – is immanent to the film. It is its absent centre.~ Slavoj Žižek’s latest book is “Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism” (Verso, £50)

Friday, September 07, 2012

One hundred and fifty years ago, the corporation was a relatively insignificant entity. Today, it is a vivid, dramatic and pervasive presence in all our lives. It is the dominant institution of our time. A complex, sobering, yet darkly amusing documentary, THE CORPORATION takes its audience on a graphic and engaging quest to reveal the corporation's inner workings, curious history, controversial impacts and possible futures. Mark Achbar, co-director of the influential and inventive MANUFACTURING CONSENT: NOAM CHOMSKY AND THE MEDIA, teams up with co-director Jennifer Abbott and writer Joel Bakan to examine the far-reaching repercussions of the corporation's ascent.

Based on Bakan's best-selling book, "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power", the film has achieved international critical and box office success. Winner of 10 audience awards, including Sundance, and 26 awards in total from prestigious festivals around the world, it stands as the top-grossing Canadian feature documentary of all time. THE CORPORATION includes encounters and interviews with CEOs and top-level executives from a range of industries: energy, pharmaceutical, computer, tire, carpet, sporting goods, public relations, branding, news, advertising, and undercover marketing, as well as the first management guru, the first corporate-sponsored university students, a Nobel-prize winning economist, a corporate spy, and a range of academics, critics, historians and thinkers.

THE CORPORATION reveals that legally, a corporation is granted the status of a "person", and asks: "If that's the case, what kind of person is it?" To assess the "personality" of the corporate "person," a checklist is employed, using diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and the DSM IV, the standard diagnostic tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. It turns out the operational principles of the corporation give it a highly anti-social "personality": it is self-interested, inherently amoral, callous and deceitful; it breaches social and legal standards to get its way; it does not suffer from guilt, yet it can mimic the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. A disturbing diagnosis is delivered: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath. THE CORPORATION depicts numerous, inspiring, corporate harm reduction strategies employed by individuals and organizations working to regulate, re-write and reform this formidable societal force.

The first video is the morning session of the first day of His Holiness the Dalai Lama's three-day teaching on Shantideva's "A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of LIfe" given at the Main Tibetan Temple in Dharamsala, India, on September 4-6, 2012.

Each of the following videos continue from there - covering the three day series of lectures.

David Cronenberg has a new film out (released August 19th in the U.S., earlier in Europe) called Cosmopolis - starring Robert Pattinson (don't let this put you off - Cronenberg gets great performances from mediocre actors). It also features Juliette Binoche, and that is always a good thing - as well as the talented Paul Giamatti. The film is based on a novel by Don Delillo.

By R.U. Sirius

﻿August 28, 2012

Eric Packer (played by Robert Pattison) — reigning master of the universe of unencumbered digital financial trading — spends most of his disastrous day in the back of a limo determined to make it across New York City in the midst of traffic chaos caused by a presidential motorcade, to get a haircut, but not, as we will discover, any haircut.

Impeccably dressed, physically perfect, emotionally smooth, and despite a series of sexual encounters during this single day with beautiful female subordinates — Packer’s world, until today, is nothing but data.

At the beginning of the film, we see massive data flows zipping around a small computer screen operated by a hacker employee, and we understand that his world of unfailing predictions based on this data has been disrupted by an error that threatens him with massive financial losses. But Packer, despite the seeming practicality of the bad day he is facing, is more interested in his existential situation. He’s having a crisis of meaning and of feeling.

As he and his driver make their way through NYC’s jammed streets, various courtiers slip into his limo to talk about some aspect of his business situation only to be peppered by stark questions that tilt away from business and lean towards meaning. And yet, his quasi-philosophical inquiries are all oriented towards calculation as opposed to insight (and how many of our singularitarian friends would acknowledge that a distinction exists). Packer is in the vanguard of his generations’ and our culture’s reorientation from lived to statistical experience.

The film hinges on two particular events. Event one: Packer’s previously unfailing prediction machine has failed to predict a crisis in the yuan. Event two: Packer’s daily medical examination turns up a peculiar (and contextually funny) problem that I won’t spoil for you… but both problems revolve around the incursion of irregularity into his smooth world.

Here we have the Quantified Life at its apotheosis. Even in the midst of sexual encounters, there are conversations that seek information about the nature of the business and sexual relationships and — during the peak of one sex scene — his female partner reports on her successful jogging routine and provides a statistical particular about her fat-to-muscle ratio.

In mixed reviews, much has been made of Cronenberg taking on Wall Street capitalism (and let’s remember that all this is based on the critically underrated DeLillo 2003 novel of the same name) in a biting satire that’s not at all a comedy. There is that. But the critics miss the larger undercurrent, which should have clarified for them during the last scene (and I will spare you any further spoilers). Several shocking scenes (yes, this is Cronenberg), including the finale, bring home for us that Packer is seeking some experience — any experience — that is not quantifiable. Whether he finds it or not, I’ll leave for you to sort out.

Oscar Wilde famously said of his countrymen, “They know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” But he was thinking of craggy old industrialists who actually traded in things. For Packer, price and value are both de-prioritized by the ersatz bliss of those baptized in dataflow. It’s a cold but pleasurably high, until something unsmooth, like a poor person or a bodily peculiarity, makes an unpredicted intervention.

Patter

The first thing you notice is that the limo isn’t moving. At the beginning of David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, the luxury vehicle bearing Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), a billionaire financial manager of some sort, is stuck in traffic. He’s on his way to get a haircut on the other side of Manhattan, a trip he insists on taking despite warnings from his bodyguard Torval (Kevin Durand) that it will be nightmarish.

Even though the car does transport Eric to a series of stops, interior shots deny the audience a sense of true forward motion. When the limo pushes forward, the images of the city we see through the windows look fake, and familiar New York background noise falls silent: no honking horns, no engine vibrations, hardly any sound at all, except the voices of Eric and whoever hitches a ride with him along the way.

This lack of sound exists whether the windows are open or closed—as Eric does when he has sex with his longtime mistress Didi (Juliette Binoche). It underscores a sense of fakeness for much of the film, as well as the metaphorical allusion of the drive: Eric is going nowhere. The world comes to him in his limo-shaped box: business, sex, even regular prostate exams from his doctor.

Cosmopolis never breaks from Eric’s point of view (Pattinson is in every scene), following him as exits the vehicle, as when he takes meals with his wife Elise (Sarah Gadon). They might be described as “estranged” if they ever looked to be more than cordial strangers in the first place. They speak to each other, as most of the characters in the movie do, in dialogue that is by turns witty, elusive, and theatrical. The writerly quality reminds us that Cronenberg’s screenplay adapts a Don DeLillo novel, making some narrative tweaks while maintaining much of the original dialogue.

The elevated patter, combined with the financial-world setting, at first seems to signal that Cosmopolis is a departure for the director, both from his creepy sci-fi horror days and his recent collaborations with Viggo Mortensen. But as the movie presses on, it feels more of a piece with Cronenberg’s oeuvre, unnerving and darkly funny. Eric’s semi-mobile fortress is tricked out with a number of touch-screens, their numbers constantly scrolling through his peripheral vision, and his various business associates talk in elevated, obtuse terms—Vija (Samantha Morton) drops by the car to talk about “cyber-capital”—that give the film an eerie science fiction-like quality.

From these otherworldly touches and a constructed New York City that only vaguely resembles the real thing, Cosmopolis builds surprising tension from what is essentially a 24-to-36-hour car ride (time is hard to measure here, another subtle source of anxiety). It is by no means a traditional thriller, but Cronenberg evokes a sense of dread, exacerbated by occasional, unpredictable bursts of violence. By the movie’s final stretch, Eric finds himself drawing a gun and walking down an icky greenish brown hallway that’s more recognizably Cronenbergian than his antiseptic white limo.

As usual, Cronenberg shows masterful control, starting with Pattinson. He uses the actor’s morose flatness to great effect. Playing a hollow, amoral human being, Pattinson is more hauntingly vampiric here than in any of his Twilight ventures, an impression emphasized by his occasional stumbles over DeLillo’s words.

Some audience members will stumble there, too. An hour and 48 minutes is a long time to listen to actors, however talented, speak in more or less the same narcotizing tones, dotted with zingy turns of phrase and stagy variations on phrases like “This is true” and “I know this.” The artifice can seem showboaty, an odd fit with Cronenberg’s precise, repetitive framing. But the film is premised on contrasts, especially between such verbal gobbledygook and the social unrest just outside Eric’s bunker on wheels; he’s bedeviled by an ongoing anti-capitalism protest, whose participants use dead rats as mascots, a backdrop drawn from DeLillo’s 2003 text that here feels vague and unnecessarily allusive.

But, just when the movie threatens to find a dead end in so much metaphor, Paul Giamatti turns up to bring it home. Playing Benno Levin, an unhinged man with a connection to Packer, he dominates the movie’s final stretch, which moves further from the limo’s comforts, down that greenish Cronenberg hallway. The car’s literal forward momentum stops, but the film’s keeps crawling toward an ending both poetic and inevitable—and, yeah, a little theatrical, too. Cronenberg and DeLillo’s clinical remove gives way to showmanship after all. 6 Stars

Intentionally or not, movies in the past year or so have set about tackling the questions of Occupy Wall Street and/or our general economic gloom. The Dark Knight Rises pitted Batman's Have against Bane's Have-Not, the conclusion of which was... well, no one's quite sure about that. Margin Call dramatized a day in the lives of investment bankers who talk like Wall Street Journal op-eds. Spike Lee, to no one's particular surprise, has sketched the effects of our growing economic inequality on a Brooklyn neighborhood in Red Hook Summer. And in next month's Arbitrage, Richard Gere, in the grand tradition of actors giving moral complexity to assholes, will play a hedge-funder who's basically Bernie Madoff. They all take a cue from Wall Street, the movie that made wariness of investment bankers a social norm and now looks all the more naive for it.

Thankfully, then, there is David Cronenberg. From Videodrome to Crash to A History of Violence, the director has never felt the need to seriously address the real-world concerns of the day, or even adhere to conventional narrative logic. (Holly Hunter wrecks her car, then masturbates? Why not?) His new movie, Cosmopolis, is a great send-up of our economic anxiety. It's true that the characters talk endlessly, as they do in Don DeLillo's 2003 book, but none of it amounts to much. It's empty banter, a parody of boardroom jargon. Robert Pattinson as an even less likable Bud Fox type named Eric Packer (the actor's flat, charmless American accent has never been better suited to a role) asks his employees inane questions they can't possibly hope to answer, like "Why are airports called airports?" They refuse to respond out of fear they'll lose his respect.

All the talk avoids the real subject, which for Cronenberg is never far from death. As Pattinson's Eric loses his personal fortune over the course of a day, his life becomes a series of escalating body-horror gags. There are two security threats against him, one of which turns out to be a literal pie in the face. The best joke, though, is a scene in which he receives a prostate exam while discussing the yuan. (For Cronenberg, that's "sexual tension.") By the end, Eric has become so disillusioned with himself that he sees violence as a way out. He shoots a hole through his hand just so that he can "feel something."

Movies are very bad at explaining our national problems to us (see: any film by Michael Moore). At their best, they can only make those problems more vivid. Cosmopolis takes an unremarkable proposal, that our economic system is hurtling toward chaos, to its logical conclusion. (The opening shot of a Pollock-style drip painting in the making is a sign of what's to come.) It's effective for all the reasons, as propaganda, it's not: It's messy and goofy and unsettling. It has no clear answers, not even in the brilliant final scene, a confrontation between Pattinson's Eric and a disgruntled former employee played by Paul Giamatti, the central question of which seems to be, Why do some people accumulate massive amounts of wealth, while others are left to go broke and die? The scene ends, instead, with a loaded gun.

Our own Wall Street becomes more absurd with every day's headlines. It's unclear if anyone really understands it, including the Wall Streeters themselves, though a lot of producers seem to want to try very hard. Cronenberg's outright refusal to negotiate with realism, his fervent imagination, may be the more appropriate impulse. To get to the heart of a spectacle, sometimes, requires more spectacle.

Gert de Boer, Brennen McKenzie, and Doug Smith join us to talk about scientific skepticism and Buddhism.

We’ve found that there is a wonderful alignment between scientific naturalism, and secular Buddhism. Attitudes about Gotama’s presence as a human and the constraints of that embodiment, the veracity of first person experiences, and how we value the mutual support of community are rich areas for mutual exploration between these two disciplines. To serve as an introduction to some of these ideas, we’re going to have a round table discussion with three active free thinkers and meditation practitioners.

Gert de Boer

Gert de Boer studied philosophy with physics and mathematics as subsidiary subjects at the State University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. He moved to Switzerland where he is working as a database programmer. Since 2000 he is a regular participant of Buddhist meditation retreats, mainly with Reb Anderson. He is engaging, (sometimes fanatically) in the discussion fora of CFI, pleading for tolerance and correct understanding of science, religion and values, trying to put them on the right place in the human universe.

Brennen McKenzie

Brennen McKenzie is a small animal veterinarian in California and an advocate for a skeptical, science-based approach to medicine. He is the author of the SkeptVet Blog, a contributor to the Science-Based Medicine blog, and president of the Evidence-Based Veterinary Medicine Association. Dr. McKenzie has also found Buddhist meditation practice personally helpful and enriching, and he has an interest in the pragmatic, naturalistic approach of Secular Buddhism. He has been known to play the mandolin and the Irish pennywhistle and to wear the kilt, though he does not claim to do any of these well.

Doug Smith

Doug Smith had his first real exposure to Buddhism in an intro course at Princeton University, where he practiced Zen meditation while getting his bachelor’s degree in philosophy. He continued on to a PhD in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, undertaking a minor in South Asian studies, which included classes from a Tibetan Geshe and several semesters of Sanskrit. An inveterate skeptic and secularist, in 2006 Doug got involved in volunteering for the Center for Inquiry, an organization created “to foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values”. He was made lead administrator of their web forum in 2007, where he still hangs out, chatting about philosophy, religion, skepticism and helping stem the unending tide of spammers.

So, sit back, relax, and have a nice Lapsang Souchong, with thanks to our wonderful guests for the suggestion.

We do education and outreach through our prevention program, we provide Sexual Assault Response Services for survivors in the hours following an assault, we provide crisis advocates to help those who are reaching out for help for the first time, and we provide free therapy for survivors and their loved ones (secondary survivors). We do a whole lot more than I can even list here.

Jacob Wyatt's short animation Metro begins with a very mundane problem: a girl having trouble navigating the subway platform. But when a fox steals her metro ticket, she follows it on a chase through the secret world that exists between the subway platform and the surface world, filled with both expected and unexpected views. And when she reaches the fox's final destination, she'll be glad that the critter stole her ticket.

Very Bad Wizards is a collaboration between Tamler Sommers, a philosopher at the University of Houston, and David Pizarro, a psychologist at Cornell University. We first met at a conference on ethics a few years ago, and have been arguing (and occasionally agreeing) about morality ever since.

At some point we realized that our conversations were entertaining (and crazy) enough that other people might enjoy eavesdropping. With that in mind we began recording a series of podcasts, and created this website to give them a proper home.

Listen to episode:

Episode notes

Dave and Tamler start out talking about the new wave of skepticism about free will and moral responsibility in the popular press from people like Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne.

Neuroscience figures heavily in their arguments, but Dave and Tamler agree that neuroscientific data adds little of substance to the case other than telling us what we already know: human beings are natural biological entities. Dave also accuses Tamler of being a hipster philosopher for abandoning a view once it got popular.

Next, ​our podcasters talk about what kind freedom we need to have in order to deserve blame and punishment. Do we need to create ourselves out of the swamps of nothingness? Dave comes out as a Star Trek nerd and asks whether we're all, in the end, like Data the android. They also wonder whether a belief in free will is all that's keeping us from having sex with our dogs.

​Finally, Dave grills Tamler about his new book on the differences in attitudes about free will and moral responsibility across cultures. After seeing how long they've been carrying on, they then agree to talk about all the stuff they left out in the next episode.

This is an useful post from Rick Hanson in which he adapts Michelle McDonald's (a senior mindfulness teacher) R.A.I.N. acronym for achieving greater self-awareness. The more we practice this, the less reactive we become, and the less we get emotionally and energetically ensnared by little things.

When you’re young, the territory of the psyche is like a vast estate,
with rolling hills, forests and plains, swamps and meadows. So many
things can be experienced, expressed, wanted, and loved.

But as life goes along, most people pull back from major parts of
their psyche. Perhaps a swamp of sadness was painful, or fumes of toxic
wishes were alarming, or jumping exuberantly in a meadow of joy
irritated a parent into a scolding. Or maybe you saw someone else get in
trouble for feeling, saying, or doing something and you resolved,
consciously or unconsciously, to Stay Away From That Place Forever.

In whatever way it happens, most of us end up by mid-adulthood living
in the gate house, venturing out a bit, but lacking much sense of the
whole estate, the great endowment of the whole psyche. Emotions are shut
down, energetic and erotic wellsprings of vitality are capped, deep
longings are set aside, sub-personalities are shackled and silenced, old
pain and troubles are buried, the roots of reactions – hurt, anger,
feelings of inadequacy – are veiled so we can’t get at them, and we live
at odds with both Nature and our own nature.

Sure, the processes of the psyche need some regulation. Not all
thoughts should be spoken, and not all desires should be acted upon! But
if you suppress, disown, push away, recoil from, or deny major parts of
yourself, then you feel cut off, alienated from
yourself, lacking vital information about what is really going on
inside, no longer at home in your own skin or your own mind – which
feels bad, lowers effectiveness at home and work, fuels interpersonal
issues, and contributes to health problems.

So what can we do? How can we reclaim, use, enjoy, and be at peace
with our whole estate – without being overwhelmed by its occasional
swamps and fumes?

This is where R.A.I.N. comes in.

How?

R.A.I.N. is an acronym developed by Michelle McDonald, a senior mindfulness teacher,
to summarize a powerful way to expand self-awareness. (I’ve adapted it a
bit below, and any flaws in the adaptation are my own, not Michelle’s.)

R = Recognize: Notice that you are experiencing something, such as
irritation at the tone of voice used by your partner, child, or
co-worker. Step back into observation rather than reaction. Without
getting into story, simply name what is present, such as “annoyance,”
“thoughts of being mistreated,” “body firing up,” “hurt,” “wanting to
cry.”

A = Accept (Allow): Acknowledge that your experience is what it is,
even if it’s unpleasant. Be with it without attempting to change it. Try
to have self-compassion instead of self-criticism. Don’t add to the
difficulty by being hard on yourself.

I = Investigate (Inquire): Try to find an attitude of interest,
curiosity, and openness. Not detached intellectual analysis but a gently
engaged exploration, often with a sense of tenderness or friendliness
toward what it finds. Open to other aspects of the experience, such as
softer feelings of hurt under the brittle armor of anger. It’s OK for
your inquiry to be guided by a bit of insight into your own history and
personality, but try to stay close to the raw experience and out of
psychoanalyzing yourself.

N = Not-identify (Not-self): Have a feeling/thought/etc., instead of
being it. Disentangle yourself from the various parts of the experience,
knowing that they are small, fleeting aspects of the totality you are.
See the streaming nature of sights, sounds, thoughts, and other contents
of mind, arising and passing away due mainly to causes that have
nothing to do with you, that are impersonal. Feel the contraction,
stress, and pain that comes from claiming any part of this stream as
“I,” or “me,” or “mine” – and sense the spaciousness and peace that
comes when experiences simply flow.

* * *

R.A.I.N. and related practices of spacious awareness are fundamental
to mental health, and always worth doing in their own right.
Additionally, sometimes they alone enable painful or challenging
contents of mind to dissipate and pass away.

But often it is not enough to simply be with the mind, even in as
profound a way as R.A.I.N. Then we need to work with the mind, by
reducing what’s negative and increasing what’s positive. (It’s also
necessary to work with the mind to build up the inner resources needed
to be with it; being with and working with the mind are not at odds with
each other as some say, but in fact support each other.)

And whatever ways we work with the garden of the mind – pulling weeds
and planting flowers – will be more successful after it R.A.I.N.s.